I have thought about the multiple elo ratings for different kind of maps. I think it can really solve the issue. Elo isnt transferable between all maps, but i do think. Elo will be pretty much transferable between same minded maps. Let face it: The difference between Arabia and Serengeti is much smaller than the difference between Arabia and Black forest. Having different ladders for each kind of map, makes it possible to have accurate elo for matchmaking and it will gives players more freedom over the maps.
The difference between random civ and pick civ wont be really that big. I also think there would be many players who enjoy both on the ladder. So this is no reason to split the ladder. There are pretty much two difficult questions to answers:
- Which ladders do we need?
- Where to place every map?
Open and close are pretty much guarenteed as different ladders. Do we need a water/hybrid ladder? For e water/hybrid maps are closer to open maps, than closed maps. Fast feudal and some water war is the play in these maps. It is not really about booming. Other already said about open and close/water maps. So they put water/hybrid maps more together with closed map. I think this is much more based on there preference (of playing only open maps). So i think having a water/hybrid map is needed.
Than we also have maps like Nomad and MegaRandom. Can we just merge them into hybrid maps? Nomad is to me also a hybrid map and MegaRandom can be everything? But if we had Nomad, we can also add other no TC starts for some time to the queue. It seems a bit strange if we have land nomad in the water/hybrid map pool. This is something we need to think about.
At this moment i would go for the following:
- RM 1v1 open
- RM 1v1 hybrid
- RM 1v1 closed
- RM team open
- RM team hybrid
- RM team closed
- DM 1v1
- DM team
- EW 1v1 (?)
- EW team (?)
- Maybe add also something for other games modes if the player base is big enough. Someone mentioned wonder race, but i doubt it will be popular. I havent seen such game in DE in the lobby. Dont have MM for wonder race, i would say. On the other side there are always lobbies with KotH for example. So having something kind of rating for KotH in the MM queue can be good. I really think there will be more KotH games than just DM games.
If we have such system with more ladders, i would even go as far as saying unlimited bans isnt an issue anymore. Since elo between the maps in the map pool is pretty much transfarable, this is no issue any more. I even think it will attracked people from unranked, since some of them just wanna play balanced 4v4 BF games for example.
Expand RM from 2 to 6 ratings can be good for the game. 6 isnt to much, but each elo is meaningful. Thing is: for this they might need to reset Elo and i dont know if the devs want to do this. On the other side: Currently there seems something off in the elo calculation of team games:
If they found the issue with elo, they might consider resetting, since some players have some odd ratings at this moment and therefore cant get good team games (issues seems to only happen in teamgames / unranked to me).
Drawback of multiple ladders is having longer waiting times. I think for most players it wont really matter that much. Mostly impopular maps will really suffer.